Wet Hot American Summer: the movie every comedy snob has to see

How did a cult oddity nobody saw, starring a bunch of unknown weirdos, become a star-packed Netflix series? The story of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp

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Wet Hot couple Paul Rudd and Marguerite Moreau then (left) and now (right)

Jonathan Bernstein 30 July 2015 • 7:38pm

The term cult classic may not have faded into obscurity, but actual living breathing, contemporary examples of the phenomenon certainly have. Think back to the Rocky Horror Show, to Spinal Tap, The Evil Dead, Eraserhead, Night of the Living Dead, Death Race 2000, Dark Star, and even Showgirls. Neglected, ridiculed, obscure, misunderstood movies that sputtered and died in the mainstream multiplex but cultivated the sort of small, fervently appreciative audience happy to attend midnight showings in specialist cinemas.

Wet Hot American Summer is the very definition of a cult movie. This week, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler and Elizabeth Banks will show up in Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp. They’re reprising their roles in the sitcom prequel to a 2001 film seen by few but hailed as a classic by those who proudly identify themselves as members of its cult.

An absurd parody of the summer camp subgenre of Eighties U.S teen movie, Wet Hot American Summer, may not be the equal of any of the aforementioned features — not even Showgirls — but in the 14 years since pulling in an initial boxoffice haul of $295,000, the film’s reputation has grown. Among comedy snobs, Wet Hot American Summer has taken on the stature of a taste barometer: you can judge someone’s sense of humour by their opinion of the movie. If it goes over their head, a friendship is unlikely to bloom.

The movie’s ensemble mingled unseasoned first-timers (Poehler and Banks) rising talents (Rudd and Cooper, then in the segment of his career when he was only cast as the dork) and, in Janeane Garofalo and David Hyde Pierce, two of the more established comic presences of that particular moment.

Reviews were few and mostly hostile (“So depressing I almost started to cry,” said the Washington Post), but DVD and then Netflix afforded a dead-on-arrival dud a prolonged and prosperous afterlife. “I thought to myself, this thing is going to absolutely tank at the boxoffice,” cast member Michael Ian Black (who shared a tastefully lit sex scene and a wedding with Cooper’s character) remarked recently. “You put things out. Nobody watches them. And then, three years later, everybody tells you how much they loved them.”

Black, in common with Wet Hot director David Wain and co-writer Michael Showalter, was a former member of The State, a New York comedy group who had a highly regarded, little-watched MTV series in the mid-Nineties. For their movie debut, Wain and Showalter decided to make a summer camp movie that contained all the tropes established in Ivan Reitman’s classic Meatballs – clueless, horny teenage camp counsellors getting high while teaching weepy homesick campers to have fun – as well as their own experiences at Jewish summer camps.

While much of Meatballs’ running time is devoted to allowing Bill Murray the freedom to improvise, he is the only loose cannon in the film. Wet Hot American Summer has a different agenda. “(It) has the outer trappings, by design, of a certain kind of comedy, and it doesn’t deliver on that at all,” said David Wain. As soon as the opening credits, filled with the promise of standard issue teen-movie debauchery, fade away, Wain begins dropping heavy hints that his movie, set in Pennsylvania’s Camp Firewood on August 19, 1981, the last day of camp, will quickly be loosening its grip on sanity.

Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper in Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp

Familiar characters go through well-worn situations. Creepily sincere nice-guy counsellor Coop (Michael Showalter) pines for foxy Katie (Marguerite Moreau) devoted girlfriend of obnoxious, unfaithful douchebag Andy (Paul Rudd, playing his character like a tantrummy three year-old). Camp director Beth (Janeane Garofalo) expresses her interest in neighbouring astrophysicist, Henry (David Hyde Pierce) by getting him to talk to the campers about the wonders of the universe.

Lovelorn counsellor Gail (Molly Shannon) bemoans her latest doomed relationship to the preteens under her charge. Gene (Christopher Meloni), the grouchy Vietnam vet who cooks up the slop in the kitchen, is tough on the rest of the staff.

Then Beth takes the camp van into town and a bunch of counsellors tag along. Within seconds, they buy a huge bag of coke from a sleazy dealer up an alley. Seconds later, they’re mugging pensioners in the street, then they’re lying drooling in a heroin daze deep in the murky bowls of a filthy drug den. Seconds later, they’re back in camp, laughing and high-fiving like they just had the funniest field trip ever.

The cast of Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp

From that moment on, everything is acceptable. Andy is responsible for the drowning deaths of two campers. (He throws the bodies of witnesses from moving vehicles.) Gail takes relationship advice and shoulder rubs from a 10-year-old she ends up marrying. Gene is liberated from the drudgery of the kitchen by a talking can of mixed vegetables and has sex with a fridge in front of the campers. Beth and Henry save the camp from Skylab, the Nasa space station that plummeted from the sky in 1981. Despite Andy being literally the worst guy in the world, Katie still chooses him over nice guy Coop because she wants to keep having sex with him.

The most popular comedies of 2001 were the Rush Hour and American Pie sequels, The Princess Diaries and Legally Blonde. Wet Hot American Summer was, by comparison, a sloppy, almost-surrealistic comedy that wasn’t designed to please a mass audience. “It’s genre parody,” said Michael Ian Black. “It’s absurd, and it’s really silly, but it’s dark. And when you throw that mix of ingredients into a blender, it’s going to confuse some people.”

But, over the next few years, sloppy, almost surrealistic comedies did begin pleasing mass audiences. Specifically, Will Ferrell’s Anchorman and Step Brothers, and Judd Apatow productions like Pineapple Express and This Is The End. “That kind of heightened, absurd insanity,” said Black. “We were sort of on that territory with Wet Hot. I hope there’s some direct correlation.”

Throughout the 2000s, the moribund movie continued to reveal signs of life. The Fox network commissioned a sitcom pilot. “They were like, We can’t do a show that takes place only in the summer. It’s a network show. It’s all year long,” recalls Wain. “We’re like, why did you order if it you can’t do it.”

Live screenings in New York and San Francisco, with cast members in attendance, drew increasingly large and enthusiastically participatory audiences dressed as their favourite characters. By the time Wain and Showalter found themselves taking part in 10th anniversary celebrations for Wet Hot American Summer, they began to give serious thought to continuing the movie. “We started developing the feature film version,” said Wain. “And then we started to realise simultaneously that the story we were trying to tell was too epic to fit into a film.”

Netflix, the home of the resurrected Arrested Development, rolled out the welcome mat for Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp. The eight-episode prequel features the entire original cast, plus cameos from, among others, Jon Hamm, Chris Pine and Lake Bell, playing slightly more youthful versions of the characters they played 14 years earlier.

Revivals of this nature tend to bring out strong, proprietorial feelings on the part of audiences fearful of witnessing the desecration of sacred texts, the aforementioned Arrested Development being a case in point. Wet Hot American Summer does not inspire similar trepidation.

The work Wain and Showalter continued to do in movies like They Came Together and TV shows like Children’s Hospital are strong indicators that the Netflix show will appeal to a very particular cult. “When someone comes up to you and talk to you about Wet Hot,” remarked Amy Poehler. “what they’re actually saying to you is, I’m not just a regular fan of your work.”